Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese Reunite for ‘Devil in the White City’

Now Devil in the White City is back at Paramount, and Leonardo DiCaprio has brought Martin Scorsese onto the project. Paramount has won an auction to purchase the film rights to The Devil in The White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, a nonfiction book by author Erik Larson which was published in 2003.

The project is now housed at Paramount and is expected to be the next film for both Scorsese and DiCaprio, with the latter playing the doctor. The new report says that Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese and producer Rick Yorn were all impressed by Billy Ray’s new take on the feature – which will see Dr. HH Holmes be the co-lead of the film and share protagonist time with the producer/architect of the Worlds Fair. Holmes was responsible for murdering somewhere between 27 and 200 people during the World’s Fair, which was held in Chicago in 1893. The sociopath used charm and guile to lure guests into what became known as a “murder castle”, a haunt that had a gas chamber, crematorium and a dissecting table where Holmes would murder his victims and strip their skeletons to sell for medical and scientific study. While it sounds like The Devil In The White City will be the next collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, exactly when they will be making it remains a bit of a mystery.

The very heavily researched and detailed historical novel tells the story of Daniel H.Burnham, the architect tasked with building the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition, aka the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. DiCaprio will play the role of Holmes.

Besides “The Wolf of Wall Street”, DiCaprio and Scorsese have made “Gangs of New York“, “The Aviator“, “The Departed” and “Shutter Island” together. The Fair was essentially an entire city that needed to be built in two years.